A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

To contact me about organizing, email me at rpwolff750@gmail.com

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Wednesday, March 19, 2014

AMONG THE THINGS THAT REALLY BUG ME

Old joke:Man walks
into a working class bar where seven men are hunched over beers.The average net worth in the bar is now seven
billion dollars.Who is the man?Answer, Bill Gates.You would think that by now people would
understand the difference between the mean, or average, and the median, the
point in a linear array of items midway between those below and those above, on
some scale of measurement.

Well, good old MSN has screwed it up, and not, I think, by
accident.They have a story on their
website about a list of twenty-one jobs that pay the average wage of roughly
$24 an hour, or more than $48,000 a hear.Pretty good looking jobs, I must say.The only problem is that the median
wage is a bit more than $13.50 an hour, or $27,500 a year. Fully half
of all the full-time employed men and women in the United States make less than
that.HALF.The average is pulled
way above the median by the high wages of people at or near the top of the
income pyramid [including me, when I was working as a senior professor, and all
the other senior professors atAmerican
universities.]

1. A tax cut can hugely favor the rich AND2. The rich still wind up paying a larger share of total taxes

The missing piece of the picture is that the rich have ALSO gotten such a huge increase in income.

The best "story" version of this I have come up with (and it is still lame) is: "my boss got both the biggest raise AND the biggest tax cut. But the raise was so HUGE that he still wound up paying a little more in taxes."

I think inequality of income stems in no small part from the strong human tendency to innumeracy. Unequal ability to understand numbers yields unequal ability to count money, and from there you quickly get to unequal ability to accumulate the stuff.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.